Hi there, have you guys noticed gnome-shell using many gigs of RAM? I suspect this builds up over time as this clears after reboot.
Seen many similar reports on various sites and there are two things suggested -
extensions - which I don’t have and
switch from x11 to wayland - which I believe is the default.
This is on rocky 8.5 / frozen on kernel 4.18.0-348.23.1.el8_5.x86_64. Updating this box is super tricky but if this is a known issue / there is a version that fixes this I can go through the ordeal.
I am looking at top output. Perhaps there is a better way? Also, I didn’t spec gnome-shell version which is gnome-shell-3.32.2-40.el8.x86_64 on this machine.
Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but to me this reads like 3.5G of RAM.
Then after login I see
2900830 ivan 20 0 8918996 347860 115600 S 0.7 0.3 0:04.18 gnome-shell
Again - if I am reading this correctly, this is near 9G. By flipping between these two states, I was able to (naively) verify that free reports this memory as “used”.
I can see the same behaviour on Alma 9.3 with gnome-shell-40.10-14.el9_3.x86_64 (kernel 5.14.0-362.24.2.el9_3.x86_64) so likely not Rocky specific.
It does use quite a chunk of “memory”, but it seems normal. As you already have Gnome, you can use “System Monitor : Processes : gnome-shell”, then right-click and properties. It shows a breakdown of all the different types of memory. I supposed being a full featured desktop it needs to have a lot of data ready to page in and out.